A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

The purpose of this article is to review research on the construction of gender ideology and its consequences. The article begins with a summary of research focused on measuring gender ideology—individuals’ levels of support for a division of paid work and family responsibilities that is based on the belief in gendered separate spheres. We describe the ways this concept has been operationalized in widely available data sources and provide a categorization schema for the items used to measure gender ideology. We also review the research predicting gender ideology, focusing on social and demographic characteristics while concurrently examining studies using cross-sectional, trend, and panel data. Finally, this article summarizes research focused on the consequences of gender ideology, both in families and family-related behaviors and in other areas of social life where beliefs about gender are relevant, such as the workplace. We conclude with implications for future research for measurement tools, predictors of gender ideology, and consequences of ideology in individuals’ lives.

Gender Ideology: Components, Predictors, and Consequences

By situating men within the country and time period in which they live, social scientists are better able to understand men's housework and child care behaviors. The author proposes that national c...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/30039013.pdf

Care in Context: Men's Unpaid Work in 20 Countries, 1965–2003

While most previous studies focus on the effects of individuals' and couples' characteristics on the division of housework, this study argues that macro-level factors are equally important in the d...

Macro-level Gender Inequality and the Division of Household Labor in 22 Countries

The body of recent American research indicates that women continue to perform the vast majority of household labor. Understanding the conditions under which couples can achieve an egalitarian division of household labor constitutes one of the first steps in attaining gender equity in the private and public spheres. This article discusses the state of research on the division of household labor published between 2000 and 2009. After a discussion of conceptualization and methodological issues, we review empirical findings that support or challenge the micro- and macro-level perspectives (focusing on individual characteristics and national contexts, respectively) that have been proposed to explain the gendered allocation of labor. We then review studies focusing on the interplay between these two prominent perspectives.

/pdf/why-do-women-do-the-lion-s-share-of-housework-a-decade-of-4rq0crxe69.pdf

Why Do Women Do the Lion’s Share of Housework? A Decade of Research

The authors examine the effect of premarital cohabitation on the division of household labor in 22 countries. First, women do more routine housework than men in all countries. Second, married couples that cohabited before marriage have a more equal division of housework. Third, national cohabitation rates have equalizing effects on couples regardless of their own cohabitation experience. However, the influence of cohabitation rates is only observed in countries with higher levels of overall gender equality. The authors conclude that the trend toward increasing cohabitation may be part of a broader social trend toward a more egalitarian division of housework.

/pdf/premarital-cohabitation-and-housework-couples-in-cross-4ljf9fz5fr.pdf

Premarital Cohabitation and Housework: Couples in Cross‐National Perspective

Explaining educational influences on attitudes toward homosexual relations

Women's Work Is Never Done: Comparative Studies in Care-Giving, Employment, and Social Policy Reform. Sylvia Bashevkin. (Ed.) New York: Routledge. 2002. 208 pp. ISBN 0-415-93481-8. $23.95 (paper). Women's Work Is Never Done is an engaging feminist collection that advances our understanding of how welfare discourses and policies affect women as welfare recipients, caregivers, workers, and citizens. A number of contributions of this solid scholarship are worth mentioning. First, by providing a cross-national analysis of welfare regimes and their influences on women, the authors recognize the dynamic nature of welfare language and practices. Second, although the male-female differences in welfare experiences are well-documented, the contributors examine a diversity of experiences among women depending on their race, class, and age. Finally, throughout the volume the authors draw our attention to construction of citizenship in terms of who "deserves" to be considered a citizen and whether access to citizenship rights should be based on one's needs or one's societal contribution. Collectively, the contributors criticize the Moynihan report's stereotypical portrayal of African American women and contribution to the racialized construction of citizenship; the movement toward conservative family structures, in which women's interests are pushed aside; and the neoliberal practices and moralistic rhetorics of economic self-sufficiency and personal responsibility. A strong feature of the volume is that it offers alternative policy suggestions that could rectify the punitive organization of the current welfare systems and in the long-term advance gender equality. The book is organized into four sections that allow readers to easily locate topics of interest. In the first section, "Conceptual Issues," Selma Sevenhuijsen, by using the ethic of care, makes care-giving visible in the state-market-family relation triangle. Also by looking at care from a power/conflict perspective, the author recognizes that "care can be debilitating and patronizing, as well as enabling and supportive" (p. 25). In the second section, "Confronting Women's Diversity," the contributing authors bring into focus diversity among women along race, class, and age lines in their experiences in welfare state regimes. The third section, "Anglo-American Welfare Reform," examines differences and similarities in public discourses and policies on social assistance across a number of Anglo American welfare regimes. Using case study methods, the authors show that in the context of neoliberal economic restructuring, the four Commonwealth countries, with the United States in the vanguard, are shifting more toward marriage-oriented and market-based approaches to welfare that undermine the foundations of expansive social citizenship rights. …

Women's Work Is Never Done: Comparative Studies in Care-Giving, Employment, and Social Policy Reform

Since the onset of the pandemic, the nation’s healthcare system has struggled to keep up with high demand for emergency care, vaccines, and COVID-19 testing. More than two years on, doctors, nurses, and other health professionals are confronting what some call the fifth wave of the virus, with many leaving or poised to leave the profession—even as the economy faces unprecedented shortages of workers in heath care and other fields. These developments and the intense pressures they impose on health systems are occurring alongside long-standing mismatches in the supply and demand for health-care professionals and significant demographic shifts that predate the pandemic.

Jeanne Batalova

Papers

Premarital Cohabitation and Housework: Couples in Cross‐National Perspective

Explaining educational influences on attitudes toward homosexual relations

Women's Work Is Never Done: Comparative Studies in Care-Giving, Employment, and Social Policy Reform

Leveraging the Skills of Immigrant Health-Care Professionals in Illinois and Chicago